"[Klimt's] joyful creatures surrender themselves freely to the watery element as it bears them swiftly downward on its unchanneled course. We see here what will soon become a major preoccupation of Klimt -- one he shared with other art nouveau artists: woman's hair. The flowing tresses in this case mediate the sinuous bodies to the powerful thrust of the water. Klimt's women are at home in a liquefied world, where the male would quickly drown, like sailors seduced by mermaids."

I want to drown inalthough said to be a good swimmerI would forget breathingand collapse my little lungsinto the melthing of this--

where in a dreamthe poet cautioned sternly:"no rock-n'-roll in your poem"I take this to be a warninga caution about the rumored undertowfrom one who walked away from the trackswithout heavy looksand with them.

This is dense. This is dark matter. Unthinkable. My mind cannot bend this. It is so understated and dramatic. Wow. This is too much. Love it. A drug. Nobody could take much more of this without od'ing.

Very quantum poem! Your metaphors move alternately from expansions to contractions to the 'wave.'

Shadows to mass to the metamorphosed waves,radiant streaming of crearive emergy. Klimt's calligraphy for the feminine. . . the flowing hair, the cosmic waves; the sea as merewif, consumer and transformer.

I wish I could write a poem as good as Hazen's L.A. slippery slide, one millisecond as good as Clark's furry sleepwalkers, as exotic as Vassilis Zambaras' classic outlook, as melted as Wooden Boy's, as pert as Chant's, as intellectual as Andrews', as lingual as Sandra's, as dropped as Curtis', as famous as the incognito clickers and as cormorant as Ratcliffe's. Artemesia=mirror.

Even more depressing than looking at these beautiful merewifs is to be compelled to add chili peppers to your own university teaching (even if it's only community college) evaluation hotness scale. That's what your poetry desperation came to before (or after?) starting your blog about teaching, posing as a detective, privately/publicly investigating the poetics of any given situation.

(Nevada) water babies are only (safely) in Nevada's Pleistocene lakes. Just be careful when you swim in these ancient seas, you could be pulled down by your legs and eaten. Their faces are greenish-bluish and they have sharp teeth.

We had a copy of The Water Babies (illustrated by Arthur Rackham) that had been my father's as a child. A few wisps of merewif hair flowed through those pages..

The first photo seems to have been taken not so far from where the Wooden Girl and I were staying. The Royal Navy does an awful lot of training out in those waters.

Those ships are the most beautiful and monstrous threats. They're painted in such a way as to reduce visibility, but there was no missing this beast. It was there for two days, the occasional turnabout for life signs.

These seeming automata that play out an uglier game than chess...

The Klimt is just right; unstoppable flow. Fishblood is a remarkable title.

The merewif is the hero Beowulf's worst bad dream. After he slays the monster Grendel, Grendel's mother, the dragonesque water witch or merewif, bent on exacting vengeance, attacks the mead hall. Beowulf is assigned the job of dealing with her. No easy business that. No sooner has he entered her realm -- the lake, or mere, over which she presides as merewif -- than he finds himself being rudely dragged into her lair. Some hospitality! thinks Beowulf. Great bother ensues. Just as the hero is on the brink of giving up the ghost, he glimpses a sword twinkling there in the darkness of the mere. He seizes it and uses it to lop off the head of the merewif.